Madisonville Murder, Part 1

Memories

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I thought I’d never come back to James Madison High School once I graduated.

As an educational institution, the school did a good job. But, though I was young, I liked places with tradition better. The Catholic school I’d been attending in Wisconsin had roots stretching back to 1914 (as an elementary school) and graduated its first high school seniors in 1932. In contrast, Madison High, aside from being named after our fourth president, had no tradition of its own. It had just opened its ultramodern new campus shortly before I enrolled. It was all glass and chrome, immaculately painted walls and well polished floors. But it had no soul.

I supposed that was a weird way for me to think about it, considering my own agnostic beliefs. However, those beliefs had been harshly tested, and I was in the process of rethinking them.

Anyway, despite my feelings about the school, here I was, walking down an empty hallway, hearing my footsteps echo and wondering if anyone else could hear them. It was just a few days before school started, but I hadn’t seen anyone in the building, except in the main office, where I’d checked in as a visitor. I would have expected to see at least a few teachers around, getting their classrooms ready, but so far, all the classroom doors I’d passed had been shut.

That didn’t matter. I’d rather be alone here. After all, nobody would have understood why I was here. The story I’d told the secretary about wanting to take some pictures of my old alma mater wouldn’t hold up against close inspection, even though I had a decent digital camera to use as a prop. I supposed I could have claimed to be taking pictures with my cell phone, but somehow, the camera made the explanation seem solider.

Of course, if I ran into a teacher who knew me well, that explanation would melt away faster than ice on asphalt during a hot August day. I wasn’t much of a photographer. I didn’t even have an Instagram account. And I was completely unsentimental about the school.

But this visit was only intended to be a fact-finding mission—quick in, quick out. Yeah, that was the plan—if I was lucky, which I very seldom was.

I heard what I thought might be whispering in the distance, though I didn’t see anyone. Nervously, I felt for the string around my neck, hidden under my shirt collar. It held a little sack filled with dried rowan berries and dill seed, which I’d found to be excellent protection against demons. A cross would have been even better—if I’d had the faith to make it work.

Taking slow, deep, calming breaths, I continued my ramble through the school, which echoed not only with my footsteps but with memories. I passed by the locker which had until so recently been mine and some of the classrooms in which I had sat. All those hours of being a student—and more than a few of being a smartass, if I was being honest about it—were all just memories now, even less substantive than the sound of my footsteps. Most of those memories would fade within a few years

Sadly, the ones I wanted most to forget would be with me forever. I was sure of that.

None of the memories, good or bad, mattered much right now. My goal was an out-of-the-way spot that I’d seldom, if ever, visited. I’d seen it only in a photograph—the one that drew me here on this quiet summer day.

I knew I’d found the place when I saw the tiny imperfection on the wall just to the left of the door leading to a custodial supply closet. I’d first noticed the damage when I ran across a photo in an old newspaper article that covered the unfortunate suicide of Cynthia Jenkins.

I’d probably read the article when it first came out, but it was only much later, after I’d become aware of the existence of demons and exactly what they were capable of, that I began to realize what the photo might have revealed.

That mark on the wall must have been made by the beginning of my junior year—about when Cynthia supposedly took her own life. It wouldn’t have been in the news photo if it had happened after the suicide. It was surprising that, almost two years later, no one had fixed it. The mark was really a small gouge, kind of like a claw might make. A little plaster and a few brush strokes of paint would have repaired it completely. But I was lucky that no one had bothered, or I would never have been able to confirm my suspicion.

I took out of my pocket a small bottle of essential oil. I looked both ways down the hall to make sure that no one was around to see what I was doing. Then I poured a little oil into the gouge. This particular one, derived from the yellow flowering agrimony, also known as church steeple, smelled like apricots and spice, but only for a moment. It bubbled in the gouge, and suddenly, I could smell sulfur.

Agrimony had been used for centuries for a variety of purposes, among them detecting the presence of witchcraft. But as the societies that used it that way identified witchcraft with demonic activity, I reasoned that it might be a good way to detect traces of demons themselves.

I had been right. There could be no other reason for the agrimony to react in this way.

A demon had been in this hallway. It had manifested physically enough to have dug a claw into the wall.

It had been involved in Cynthia’s suicide—if that was indeed what it was.

A line from Macbeth flashed through my mind.

Murder most foul, as in the best it is
But this most foul, strange and unnatural.

---

Since I was now sure demons were involved in Cynthia’s death, I needed reinforcements. Within an hour, Gavin Johnson joined me at school, having dropped whatever he was doing without question. That’s the kind of friend he was.

He didn’t have any trouble getting into the school. I might have had to pretend to be doing some photography, but for Gavin, the school couldn’t roll out the red carpet fast enough. And why not? He’d not only been a star student one year ahead of me. He’d also been a star athlete in three sports and president of everything from the senior class to the Black Students’ Union. I was surprised the administration hadn’t put up a statue of him somewhere on campus. In this time of underfunded public schools, few things could charm money from donors’ wallets like a huge success story—for which the school would, with all humility, take as much credit as it could.

Gavin was wearing a UC Merced bobcats T-shirt and shorts, both of which served to show off his muscles.

“There’s no need for a gun show today,” I said. “Aside from the school secretary, there aren’t any women here, or haven’t you noticed?”

“Don’t joke around,” he replied in his deep, resonant voice that would have been perfect for voiceovers. “Remember, you called me here for a reason. Show me this demon mark!”

It wasn’t like Gavin to be so abrupt. Part of me wondered if I’d interrupted some extracurricular activities with a shapely coed. But Gavin already seemed angry with me, so I passed on that particular opportunity for a joke and led him to the spot.

“How do you know this is a demon claw mark,” he asked. “Who’s to say it wasn’t caused by two guys rough-housing in the hallway or maybe a custodian hitting the wall with a mop handle by accident?”

“This,” I said, applying a little more agrimony oil. “See how it bubbles. And you can smell the sulfur, right?”

Gavin nodded. “But you’re sure this can’t be explained by a normal chemical reaction?”

“I checked before I called you. Nothing that’s likely to be in paint or plaster would react that way with agrimony. Anyway, it’s pretty hard imagining someone making a gouge that deep with a mop handle without noticing. And the damage is too small for it to have been caused by two guys fighting, unless one made the other drive his finger through the wall. That hardly seems likely.”

“Don’t be so flip about it,” said Gavin, glaring at me. “This is serious.”

“Look, I’m sorry if I interrupted what you were doing when I called you. I really didn’t mean to—”

“You don’t get it,” he replied, still glaring at me. “I’m not angry because you called. I’m angry because you didn’t call sooner. When you suspected demonic activity, you should have called me immediately.”

Well, I didn’t see that reaction coming.

“You have your own life to live—” I began.

“As do you—but if you’re going to keep putting yourself in Satan’s crosshairs, I want to be there for you. Dude, you almost lost your soul. Oh, and, you nearly got killed—more than once, by my count. Honestly, part of me wishes that you’d just stay out of this kind of situation.”

“You know why I can’t,” I said. An image of Amanda, the girl whose soul I had to find some way of saving from Satan’s clutches, flashed through my mind, hitting me like a gut-punch.

Gavin nodded. “Yeah, I know,” he said in a much gentler tone. “But if you’re going to keep involving yourself, you need to be prepared. There’s a difference between being brave and being foolish.”

“Point taken,” I said. “But I always come prepared.”

Gavin chuckled despite himself. “Yeah, I bet you have the herbalist’s whole inventory on your person—but I’ve seen the kind of forces Satan can throw at you—and that was before you’d made a complete nuisance of yourself.”

Gavin was too kind to mention that, however many herbal defenses I’d used or brought, I wouldn’t be able to do much against a physical attack if a demon brought along some deceived human victim to use as muscle. Gavin’s nickname in high school was Goliath. Mine was Leprechaun. I wasn’t quite as small as the nickname might have suggested, but I was scrawny, pale, freckled, red-haired—no one’s idea of physically formidable. The first person I’d tried to rescue from a demonic pact had almost brained me with a baseball bat.

Rather than dwelling too much on the past, I stayed focused on Gavin. That was when I noticed the discreetly small cross around his neck. “I see you came prepared.”

“That’s because I know you. I’d have stopped for holy water if I had time. Now, we know something suspicious happened to Cynthia. But what are we going to do about it? We can’t exactly call the police in a situation like this. And regardless of that, what outcome do you want here? There’s no victim you can save this time. And there’s certainly no criminal who can be held accountable.”

That was when it hit me. I’d thought I was so clever when I spotted a sign of demonic activity.

But what did I want to happen now? I had no idea.

“Uh, I hadn’t really thought about that,” I replied. Gavin’s eyes widened in disbelief.

“If you’re going to risk your life, at least be smart about it. Let’s go someplace and figure this out.”

“We could stay here and talk. Maybe we’ll turn up another clue in the process.”

Gavin shook his head. “That might be reasonable ordinarily, but haven’t you noticed that no one else is here, except in the main office?”

“Yeah, but I figured that was coincidence,” I said slowly.

“With you, nothing is coincidence. Football practice always starts in early August, long before the opening of school. This is mid-morning, so it would have started already. Yet there are no cars in the student lot, and Coach’s car isn’t in the faculty lot. I took a quick look at the field, just be be sure. No one’s there.”

“Practice might have been cancelled—” I began.

“You don’t know Coach like I do. Nothing much short of nuclear war would get him to cancel practice. And that would only be until he could find us all radiation suits that fit over our uniforms.”

“That’s a bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think?” I said, smiling. He didn’t smile back.

“You remember Mrs. McCready, right? Sophomore English?” I nodded. “Remember how fussy she was about her bulletin boards having to be perfect? Or how she cleaned all the student desks because she said the custodians never did a good enough job on them?”

I laughed. “Yeah, a little compulsive, that’s for sure.”

“More than a little. She was always in here all day, every day for a full two weeks before school started. But she isn’t here today.”

I looked around nervously. “What are you saying?”

“I’ve done some reading since our first…adventure, and this sounds a lot like an aversion spell of some kind. I’d guess it’s demonic in nature, since neither of us, both protected from that sort of thing, was affected.”

“But there are people in the main office,” I pointed out.

“True, but that just means the main office was exempted from the spell. You wouldn’t have been able to get in if no one had been here to unlock the front entrance.”

“You mean—”

“Your finding that old newspaper article with the picture of the gouge in the wall isn’t coincidental. If I had to guess, I’d say Satan set a trap for you—and you walked right into it. We’ve got to get out of here now.”

A scratching sound exactly like something running a claw across metal lockers echoed in the hallway.

---

Madisonville Murder is related to the Soul Salvager trilogy. (The action falls between the prologue and chapter one of the first book.)

(All three books are on sale during the month of October.)

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